AGE OF RETIREMENT.

Putaruru Press, Volume II, Issue 41, 31 July 1924, Page 1

AGE OF RETIREMENT.

MAN SHOULD BE AS YOUNG AS HIS JOB. If a mail wants to know when is the time to resign there is the plain working rule: “ When you are no longer as young as your job, say so,” writes Mr. J. L. Paton, M.A., High Master of Manchester Grammar School, in the Evening News. But it ail depends on the job. A bishop, a cardinal, must be paternal. Ag-c, grey hairs—or a skull cap to cover the lack of them—and mellow wisdom are part of his qualifications. It is the same with Cabinet Ministers. Sixty is youth for a Premier. The king who listened to l.iis young swashbuckling advisers soon lost ten out of twelve tribes. But in aviation, for instance, it is the other way. Everything depends on steadiness of nerve and rapidity of action. When the pilot has done 10 years he comes to earth and becomes an administrator. The express driver is of no use when he begins to run his train at half speed. Your dentist and surgeon charge high fees because advancing years rob them of deftness of wrist and suppleness of muscle. Sir John Pranklin was in his 60th year when he was sent out by the Admiralty to discover the North-West Passage. We know better now, and send out young men to the Arctic. The teacher is mid-way between the cardinal and the air pilot. Arnold had to mount a steep corkscrew staircase to his Sixth Form room.

“ When I can’t get up those stairs at the run,” he said, “ I shall cease to teach.” Who feeds fat oxen should himself be fat; and, on the same principle, who teaches the young should himself be young. A successful administrator tells us that as a young man he sought poise and balance in the society of men older than himself; now that he has passed middle life he turns to young men for his associates and finds in them what he needs to keep Him in touch with the spirit of the age. Lord Morley did the same, and so does the new Lord Chancellor.

The best recipe for a man who wants to keep young is to fall in love with his job. And for a woman too. Sarah Bernhardt had passed the allotted span when she said, “ For me to act is to live.” The record of the centuries is full of the achievement of old men who kept young. We did not need to go back to Abraham and the longevities of Genesis. Gladstone was over 80 when he passed the first Home Rule Bill through a turbulent House of Commons. He was, in the words of William Jones, the psychologist, “ a perpetually self-renovating youth.” Of him, as of Benjamin Jowett and Pope Leo. XIII., it may be said that, like the sun, they were larger than ever in their setting. It was not that they husbanded out life’s taper to a close; they were always spending and being spent. There is no use for the old man whose eyes are all in the back of his head, who can do nothing but grumble at the degeneracy of modem days, and cannot think of the world in any other terms than those to which he grew accustomed when he was young. u I/t is the old men with old souls who are useless,” said Lord Byron.